The Sun in June

Vera Valmore and I watched the Late Show with David Letterman last night (which I saw last week). She’d missed it the first time around and so I DVR’d it, and I have to say I laughed just as much the second time through watching it again with her.

There’s a joke Letterman makes at one point regarding future plans for himself and his longtime partner and musical director Paul Shaffer. He cracks how they’re going to soon “debut our new act at Caesars Palace with our white tigers.”

I’d missed it the first time around, but when setting up that line Letterman had one that was even funnier, especially to some of us.

“Next month... it’ll be June in Las Vegas. Which, by the way, is the time to go to Las Vegas.”

Had to grin at that one, thinking about how many Junes I spent in Vegas. It’s heating up here, too, on the farm, though there’s something a little more pleasant about being here than there.

Hoping all my friends out there are able to beat the heat well enough this summer.

Last Call for Late Night

Along with about 14 million others I watched David Letterman’s show last night, his last after more than three decades of being a fixture on late night television. Was laughing pretty hard from beginning to end thanks to a lot of well chosen and edited clips and other funny business.

I remember when Letterman was late, late night -- as in a 12:30 a.m. start. In fact I even dimly remember his stint with a morning show, too. I was barely a teen when Late Night with David Letterman first premiered in early 1982, at time which happened to coincide with that period in my life when I would be staying up late a lot, too.

Watched enough of him during those years to be as influenced as anyone else by what was then considered a somewhat alternative style of comedy and general TV spoofing. Like most of my generation I continued to pay fairly close attention to Letterman right up until those “late night wars” surrounding Johnny Carson’s retirement in 1992.

Kept watching occasionally after the CBS show began airing in the summer of ’93, although by then whatever late nights I kept were school-related as for the next several years I’d be pursuing graduate degrees. Then came “real life” and full-time employment, and thus fewer late nights watching the tube.

After that came this second career writing about poker which again has me up all hours, although more often watching people play cards than crack jokes on the teevee. So while I occasionally would keep tuning in to watch the Late Show it would only be now and then, and rarely in the elective way I’d watched the NBC show.

I wasn’t paying attention, then, when Letterman had Chris Moneymaker on as a guest after he’d won the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event -- in June, that is, before that year’s WSOP had aired on ESPN. That episode doesn’t seem to be online anywhere, although Moneymaker told me once how he was pretty sure he had a tape of it somewhere.

I do recall Joe Cada’s turn on Letterman’s show in 2009, where the youngest-ever WSOP ME champ appeared just a day or two before he turned 22. Earlier that same year I wrote something here after a Steve Martin appearance on Late Show which included a funny story about Martin playing online poker after taking Ambien.

I’ve found myself distracted some over the last couple of days reading others’ stories about Letterman’s show and its significance while also looking at various clips, mostly from that first decade or so he was on the air and I was watching practically every night. And I greatly enjoyed the finale, primarily because of how Letterman characteristically downplayed the significance of the event -- entirely expected, and fitting, of course, given the self-deprecating core around which most of his humor has always been based.

I liked the sweet yet not overly sentimental way he acknowledged his mother (whom we all remember fondly, too). And I also liked how he found a spot to include his wife and son (whom we hadn’t met before), saying to them “I love you both and really nothing else matters, does it?” without being at all maudlin about it, but rather just stating a fact.

Others have (and will continue to) assign significance to his contributions to television, comedy, and the culture in general. Like Letterman himself, though, I’m dissuaded from trying to articulate any profundities explaining what it all was about.

McCain Under the Gun

An item that popped up last week while I was in Barcelona was this story about former presidential candidate and U.S. senator John McCain getting caught playing a poker game on his iPhone during a Committee on Foreign Relations hearing. Not that any hearing of such a committee is unimportant, but in this case the topic was the possible use of force in Syria -- still being considered and the subject of President Obama’s prime time speech last night -- thus exposing McCain to some censure for having allowed his focus to drift.

When I saw a few tweets and then followed a link or two to read about the incident last week, I initially thought it was a Photoshop-fueled hoax. But soon it became clear that the photo above taken by Washington Post photographer Melina Mara was exactly what it appeared to be. McCain was playing a play money game, VIP Poker, and it looks like he was calling from under the gun with Q-2-offsuit (click to enlarge).

Almost unseemly to use that term in this particular context. “Under the gun,” I mean.

I immediately thought of the first chapter of James McManus’s Cowboys Full in which he focuses a lot on poker-playing presidents, and in fact draws a pretty sharp distinction between Obama and McCain.

Tipping his hand (pun intended) in terms of his political leanings, McManus favorably highlights Obama’s poker-playing background both by noting the many correspondences between political tactics and poker strategy while also linking Obama to a long list of U.S. presidents who played the game.

Meanwhile McCain is contrastingly drawn as a lesser candidate in part because of what seems a willful turning away from poker. McManus tells of McCain’s father, John S. McCain, Sr., once advising his children “Life is run by poker players, not systems analysts,” then notes how John III “turned out to prefer craps, a loud, mindless game in which the player never has a strategic advantage and must make impulse decisions and then rely on blind luck.”

Some might recall how in the run-up to the 2008 election both Obama’s poker background and McCain’s preference for craps were briefly highlighted, most particularly in a Time feature by Michael Weisskopf and Michael Scherer appearing in July and titled “Candidates’ Vices: Craps and Poker.” Going further than McManus does in his chapter, the article vigorously searches for all sorts of meaning in the two gambling games to discover ways they might reflect personality and indicators of leadership ability.

It was the memory of these stories about McCain and craps that probably added to my skepticism when first seeing the story last week. Wait, I thought... he was playing poker? But that’s not his game...?

Shortly after Mara’s photo whipped around the web, McCain deflected the incident with a jokey tweet that shruggingly tried to make light of its significance. “Scandal!” tweeted McCain. “Caught playing iPhone game at 3+ hour Senate hearing - worst of all I lost!”

Well, of course he lost. I mean really, limping queen-deuce UTG?

Op-eds since have mostly fallen into two categories -- Sheer Outrage and No Biggie. Late night comedians have all taken their shots, too. Jon Stewart on The Daily Show used more acid than others in his treatment:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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David Letterman was relatively tame with his top ten:

And over on Conan O’Brien’s show came a sorta inspired clip from a newly imagined C-SPAN show, The Senatorial Hearing Poker Challenge:

However one responds to the story, it is safe to say “poker” doesn’t come off all that well here, once again playing the role of troublemaker.

I suppose the story wouldn’t have played too differently had McCain’s chosen game had been Words With Friends or Plants vs. Zombies. But there’s something about poker and the ready application of the game, its vocabulary, and its strategies to the world of politics that made the incident all the more enticing. And made it all the more likely to be passed around the web by the rest of us, similarly distracted by our phones.

Kudos to Cada: WSOP Champ on Letterman

You might have heard -- the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event champion Joe Cada appeared as a guest on “The Late Show with David Letterman” last night.

Kind of a coup for the WSOP and poker in general, really. And PokerStars, with whom Cada has signed.

Stars sent out a presser yesterday noting that “Cada is the first poker player to be on the show since 2004.” Not sure, but I think the reference might be to Annie Duke having been on the show after winning the Tournament of Champions as well as a bracelet in the $2,000 Omaha Hi-Lo Split event that year. I know Chris Moneymaker appeared on Letterman’s show in June 2003 -- following his Main Event victory, but prior to its airing on ESPN (and thus, really, before the resulting “boom”).

You’ll recall how last year WSOP Director of Corporate Communications Seth Palansky noted that efforts to get players from the November Nine to appear on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “Ellen” had been unsuccessful. So you know folks like Palansky and others are proud -- justly -- to see Cada accept the invite and this moment in the spotlight.

The interview itself came in the second half-hour, following a monologue with a lot of Sarah Palin jokes (she was just on “Oprah,” apparently), the Top Ten Signs Your NFL Team Owner Is Nuts, and a couple of segments with Penelope Cruz. Finally, Cada was introduced, taking his seat as Paul Schaffer and the CBS Orchestra banged out the chorus to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” (surprise). Cada was wearing a spiffy black shirt and sporting his new WSOP Main Event bracelet, about which Letterman asked his first question.

“Yeah, that’s what you get when you win it,” said Cada, still grinning. He’ll probably be that way for a while.

Letterman’s questions demonstrated some familiarity with the WSOP, with poker’s increased popularity and changing status in the culture, and even his understanding of backing deals and other aspects of professional poker.

The host started out by referring to how the WSOP had been at Binion’s, and Cada explained that “after the Moneymaker year” it had moved over to the Rio. (2005 was actually the first year at the Rio, and 2006 the first year the WSOP ME final table was at the Rio.) Letterman then asked Cada how long he’d been playing poker, to which Cada responded “about four years,” then noted how he got started playing online when he turned 18. (Cada turns 22 today, in fact.)

Letterman followed by asking Cada how his parents felt about him playing poker. Cada explained that they weren’t thrilled. Interestingly, his mother is a blackjack dealer at a casino in Detroit, “so she relates everything the same as gambling,” said Cada. “She wasn’t too happy.”

Cada was asked what was the most he’d lost playing poker. “In a day?” Cada replied, and Letterman chuckled. The answer to that was $100,000, which Cada said had happened since July (after he’d already earned the $1.2 million-plus for making the final nine). Before that, his worst day was a $40,000 loss. But Cada explained he’d never lost more than he could afford. “It’s not like I’m in over my head,” he said.

Letterman asked more questions about how the WSOP and the Main Event worked, which Cada did a good job explaining, as well as about the mental and physical exhaustion caused by the ME and the “atmosphere” at the final table. The only real comedy came when Letterman addressed how poker’s cultural status has changed of late from a sketchy pursuit to a more respectable activity.

“All of a sudden poker is everywhere,” said Letterman. “And in my mind, the winner of a big pot... they find dead in a rental car.” As the audience laughed, Letterman asked “That doesn’t happen anymore?” Cada did a good job explaining how poker was indeed generally unlike what one sees in the movies, and that poker is “a fun thing to do, socially.”

Cada was circumspect when Letterman inquired about backing arrangements and whether he had to split his winnings with anyone. “Something along those lines,” said Cada, perhaps prudently avoiding sharing details of his arrangement with Cliff “JohnnyBax” Josephy, who reportedly had at least 50% of Cada’s action for the ME. “That’s where the rental car comes in,” Letterman cracked.

And that was it. Less than five minutes, but as I say, a coup of sorts for the WSOP and for poker. And Cada should be commended for conducting himself well and taking on the daunting responsibility of trying to represent poker to the rest of the world. Sort of stuff looks a lot easier than it is -- getting interviewed in front of a sizable studio audience and before an audience of millions. If you think about it, that test last week in which Cada had to perform before the crowd at the Penn & Teller Theater at the Rio -- and the ESPN cameras -- probably didn’t hurt as a kind of preparation.

Of course, last night Cada couldn’t really rely on getting lucky to do well.

Steve Martin is a Card

Some of you might have heard about Steve Martin’s appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman on Monday night. During the interview, Letterman asks Martin about his hobbies, and Martin says “for a while I played internet poker.” The audience genuinely laughs at this news, but Martin appears utterly serious.

In all likelihood, this is yet another “bit,” but Martin plays it deadpan. Then again, Martin did tell a story earlier in the interview about having been a passenger on that U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in which the two pilots managed to set the plane safely down on the Hudson River a few weeks ago. He even had a Photoshopped pic of himself amid the other survivors.

The laughter that comes just after Martin utters the phrase “internet poker” is interesting, I guess. I took it initially as the audience finding “internet” poker (as oppposed to “real” poker) humorous. Then I thought perhaps the crowd found something funny in the incongruity of the white-haired, 63-year-old Martin playing games on the computer. (Of course, Martin has been white-haired since he was 30.) Always interesting to gauge reactions whenever poker or online poker pokes its little head above the surface of the cultural mainstream, I think.

As the laughter dies down, Martin adds “when it was legal,” which seems to suggest his understanding that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 somehow made it illegal to play. Something about the way he tells the story seems sincere, actually, and this little disclaimer about the legality -- not really necessary to the comedy, here -- seems further to suggest he’s actually on the level and this is not “a level” (as the Two Plus Two-ers would say).

Anyhow, Martin then goes on to tell about having “one of those Ambien experiences.” Ambien is a sleeping pill taken to combat insomnia, and there have been instances where people have been found sleepwalking, eating, even driving cars after taking the drug, then later having no memory of having done any of these things. You can probably guess where this is headed.

If you haven’t heard the rest of the story, I’ll let you enjoy it yourself:



Again, the reference to calling support in “Pakistan... or India” is another detail that lends support to the idea that Martin isn’t quite making all of this up. He probably is (or was) somewhat familiar with “internet poker.” The stories on PokerListings and elsewhere about Martin’s appearance on Letterman are describing him as a “hobby victim” of the UIGEA -- that is, as likely happened with many others, the passage of the law dissuaded him from playing altogether, just as it has probably kept many new players from signing up to play, too.

Gotta think if the story is at all true Martin was over on PartyPoker -- the biggest site around at the time -- and when Party left the U.S. he, and perhaps many others, simply thought that was the end. People only have so much time, energy, and cash to devote to their hobbies, and since the UIGEA did have the effect of eroding some of those limited resources, some -- like Martin, perhaps -- decided they just didn’t need the hassle.

Yeah, Martin probably said “I don’t need internet poker anymore. All I need is this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that’s all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp....”